I have to disagree with you on this one. This was discussed with the PH team beforehand. We wanted to know exactly what was cool to do, and what wasn't. And we followed their rules very closely.
So you're not just a "sarcastic tech blog commentator", but also a harsh blog post commentator :) But you're right. Removed it. Thx for reading til the end.
Answer below on what is does. We address some specific demographics so it's not necessarily something useful for you if you're not in mobile dev/product/marketing.
"Are you running a bunch of Android and iOS devices, installing apps, subscribing to push notifications in them and then gathering data that way?"
That's the basic idea except that we use virtual machines mostly, combined with some hardware components.
There is a lot of work to be done to improve the quality, uniqueness, and usefulness of mobile notifications. Before Batch Insights, there was no way to get a comprehensive view of the notifications sent by gaming/m-commerce co's or news outlets. Now, as a marketer, product manager, or developer you can use Batch Insights to become inspired and develop a more effective and differentiated strategy.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about the industry's use of mobile notifications, such as:
2. How is your competition using notifications? Track a specific vertical such as games and monitor them in real-time or follow custom groupings of the apps that matter to you. See > https://batch.com/insights/all?category=games&language=en
3. In gaming, some use incentivized notifications to reengage, others try to make you feel sorry. What's your strategy?
4. How unique is your message from day to day? Which days are most popular for certain messages? You can view statistics on the content of your notifications, as well as others'. See > https://batch.com/insights/app/ios/inside-com-breaking-news
Being mobile developers ourselves we've been dying to know. Batch Insights tries to answer these questions.
I believe that's a mistake: we link to a special page (https://batch.com/insights/hn) made specifically for HN readers that lets anyone sign-up instantly and access 100% of the features we've built as of today.
EDIT: looks like it's our special page wording that caused the confusion – we're updating it right now.
We're working on getting destination link/deeplink + open rate + conversion rate next. But before that we have a lot of advanced analytics features to build on top of the content itself. Product roadmap is quite packed!
First off, for studying apps behaviors over the past months we've observed some pretty interesting content strategies: marketers and content producers are hard at work on making notifications are more polished experience. Then, platforms are pushing notifications forward, they know it creates addictions for both developers and users so they're likely to invest more there in the future. It's becoming the interface for users. For developers, it's growth + engagement. Eventually, notifications formats themselves are evolving: richer, with images, with more characters, with more elaborate call to actions, etc. I'll think we'll see some interesting innovations in this space in the next 18/24 months.
I'm still totally with you on Cyanogenmod with no pn. As someone wrote earlier today on the Internet: 'I miss the good old days of being AFK'.
Hello HN. Founder here. Happy to answer any questions.
In a nutshell: I was inspired to build this service after the AppGratis/Apple disagreement back in 2013 where most of the controversy revolved around our supposed "abuse of push notifications" (Guideline 5.6, in Apple's book).
What happened next made me realize how important notifications were going to be: it's the next interface for users, while developers rely on them entirely for growth and engagement. But until today there was no analytics service dedicated to this new medium, which is what we're trying to build with Batch Insights.
I think this piece you're putting here shows quite well how much the definition of a round doesn't matter to anyone but VCs. Important stuff is: awesome product!
https://batch.com/features